Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and enter your name and email.
This week, Minding the Campus (MTC) intern Jessi Wynn reports on a new Inside Higher Ed survey that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by a whopping 38 points among college students. Wynn’s report reveals key insights: black students are less likely to vote in their college districts, while students from blue states attending college in swing states are registering where they attend college—influenced by blue-state parents. The number one issue swaying their vote? Abortion—or, as Inside Higher Ed euphemistically calls it, “reproductive rights.”
One might wish this were out of concern for preserving life, but history tells us otherwise. Abortion has long been a rallying cry on campuses, with students demanding expanded access, professors advocating for clinics on ships, and university health centers dispensing abortion pills—now available in vending machines at 39 schools across 17 states.
The lack of education on the inherent value of the unborn is starkly illustrated during any Q&A between students and pro-life proponents. Pro-abortion students fervently—and most often, incoherently—advocate for the right of women to take the life of an unborn child. One declared, “If I want to abort it, I’m gonna f*****g do that!” Watch just a few of these Q&As and you’ll clearly see the corrosive influence of moral relativism on our country’s campuses.
As a priest highlighted in his video “The Flaw with the Abortion Argument,” we live in a society where one couple mourns the loss of an unborn child in a car accident, yet another woman’s decision to abort a child at the same stage is met with apathy. Why? Because the value of life has become subjective, defined by convenience rather than intrinsic dignity. The pro-abortion position’s fatal flaw lies in this subjectivity.
Life is not a matter of preference, but if universities have any desire to cultivate students, who can articulate an argument for life and develop a true understanding of human dignity, they must introduce students to thinkers who uphold this objective truth. Robert P. George, Hadley Arkes, Angel Franks, and Bernard N. Nathanson are just a few that come to mind.
Robert P. George, a Princeton professor, offers an argument grounded in biology. From the moment of conception, George contends, an unborn child is a distinct human being with unique DNA. He argues that basing personhood on arbitrary characteristics like viability, which shifts with medical advancements, undermines the sanctity of life itself, turning it into a fluid concept. “I think the evidence shows that the embryo is from the beginning of its existence at conception … a human being,” he writes. But relativism sets a dangerous precedent: if viability determines personhood, who’s to say you won’t be next if you fall into a coma?
Hadley Arkes echoes George’s concern, warning of the peril in allowing subjective criteria to determine who is human. His work critiques moral relativism’s erosion of human rights, asserting that true rights must be grounded in the inherent dignity of every person, starting at conception. As he observed, in the push to create a right to abortion, society has adopted a warped logic that diminishes the gravity of taking a human life, as we are no longer sure what a human being is.
Angela Franks, in Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility, further exposes the troubling roots of today’s reproductive health policies. Franks details Sanger’s ties to the eugenics movement and how her advocacy for birth control was driven by a desire to reduce the birth rates of those deemed “unfit.” Sanger’s 1921 article “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda” explicitly states her goal: “to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” These ideas laid the groundwork for the abortion industry’s later justifications, particularly in targeting the poor and minority communities.
Franks also exposes Sanger’s deep ties to prominent eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and Harry Laughlin, connections that profoundly shaped Planned Parenthood’s early direction. Though Sanger herself did not directly influence the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, her philosophy laid the ideological groundwork for the movement that ultimately led to its passage. From 1973 until Roe was overturned in 2022, over 63 million abortions were performed in the U.S. Shockingly, despite Roe’s reversal, more than 1 million abortions were still performed in 2023—an alarming 11 percent rise from 2020.
George, Arkes, and Franks provide crucial perspectives on the defense of life, rooted in science, law, and history. Yet, perhaps the most compelling voice on this issue is Bernard N. Nathanson, a name likely unfamiliar to most college students.
Once a leading abortion advocate, Nathanson’s dramatic transformation from pro-choice pioneer to staunch pro-life advocate is a story of profound personal reckoning. After witnessing an abortion through an ultrasound, Nathanson’s beliefs crumbled, replaced by an overwhelming sense of guilt for the lives he had taken. His eventual conversion to Catholicism is a narrative of redemption—a powerful story tragically absent from today’s campuses, yet a story every student should hear before casting a ballot.
Students will rally behind Harris, who advocates for abortion, not simply because they’ve weighed all the options, but because they are immersed in a culture that increasingly devaules life. As we approach the 2024 election, this cultural influence cannot be overlooked. My hope is that these students will open their minds to reason and truth. Your responsibility as educators is to open your students to these ideas—even if they are counter cultural.
For the children, share this email with your students.
Photo by Gabriel Classon — Abortion Rights Protest in Front of Sproul Hall, 24 June 2022 — Wikimedia Commons
“Franks details Sanger’s ties to the eugenics movement and how her advocacy for birth control was driven by a desire to reduce the birth rates of those deemed “unfit.”
Jared, read up on the Eugenics movement and how the German National Socialists adopted much of it. Yes, the Holocaust started here in the US with the Eugenics folk such as Sanger. All Hitler did was expand it to post-partum abortions.
The Eugenics movement became very quiet when the horrors of the Holocaust became known, and little of this is taught today, but Sanger (and others) was quite clear on how she intended to use abortion to “exterminate” what she considered to be “inferior races.”
The article states “Because the value of life has become subjective, defined by convenience rather than intrinsic dignity. The pro-abortion position’s fatal flaw lies in this subjectivity.”
This is completely false. The intrinsic value and the dignity of the mother is a basic consideration and any essay talking about abortion should state this. In many cases, it is a choice between the fetus and the mother. That is where any decent discussion about abortion should start. Where in the Bible is that question answered? In fact, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible devalue women and give them dignity ONLY if the woman complies with the rules that rob them of dignity.
In the vast majority of cases there is no threat to the mother’s life: https://lozierinstitute.org/fact-sheet-reasons-for-abortion/
Every single state law allows exceptions in the very rare cases there is a threat to the mothers life or a major bodily function: https://lozierinstitute.org/fact-sheet-are-pro-life-state-laws-preventing-pregnant-women-from-receiving-emergency-care/
The concept of ending a pregnancy that would otherwise be fatal to the mother is so widely accepted that it has a different medical name.
What we are talking about here are “elective abortions” — where — by definition — the woman has the ability to not have the abortion and still live.
So you say that she has the right to murder her child because she is bigger — well the child’s father is bigger than her, and he might not want to be paying child support for the next 18-21 years. So why shouldn’t he be able to kill her???
John Locke wrote that every human being is granted certain inalienable rights from God, the right to one’s life, the right to one’s liberty, and the right to one’s property. That’s both in the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment.